Art in the Christian Tradition

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Title:

Deposition of Christ

Notes:

"Are not the very means of the painter everything that theology relentlessly tries to go beyond; the sensible world, semblance, the deceitfulness of appearances?...What is remarkable here is that the preeminent function falling to images, namely, the memory of the mystery of the Incarnation, coincides exactly with the most humble affirmation of the material means the painter has at his disposal: his colored vestiges. The virtue of the image, its anagogical virtue, resides perhaps less in the area of the greatest (mimetic) "success" than in the most humble materiality: the blotch of pigment...there is a double, paradoxical, valorization at work...a valorization of the mystery - and a valorization of the pure visuality of the image...In this sense, then, Fra Angelico's [artworks] constitute the spiritual decoration of a mystery linked to the incarnation of the Word." [from Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration. University of Chicago Press, 1995. pg. 56]

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